Jajmani system or Yajman system was an economic system most notably

found in villages of India in which lower castes performed various functions for
upper castes and received grain or other goods in return. It was an
occupational division of labour involving a system of role-relationships that
enabled villages to be mostly self-sufficient.

The word jajmani has its origins as a descriptor of those who paid for religious
sacrifices in the Vedic period but today refers to a system of exchange of
services.[1] As a sociological model that became much studied from the late
1950s, it is at odds with the demiurgic model posited earlier by Max Weber
and others.

A village study by William Wiser published in 1936 was the first significant
attempt to examine the relationships within the caste system of India from an
economic perspective,[3] although colonial administrators such as Baden
Henry Powell had earlier noted the phenomenon.[4] Oscar Lewis relied on
Wiser's study for his 1958 definition of the jajmani system, saying that "Under
this system each caste group within a village is expected to give certain
standardized services to the families of other castes",[3] while Harold Gould
summarised Wiser's explanation of its main features as being that the
economic services were "fixed in type, were rendered by one caste to another,
and involved primarily and characteristically payments in kind although cash
payments might also be made in some circumstances".[4]

Whilst those providing services, such as barbers and carpenters, practised

hereditary occupations, they did so not for all the occupants of a village but
rather for a specific family or group of families and the relationship between
the providers (kameen or kamin) and the receivers (jajman) persisted through
the generations. As such, the system perpetuated a patron-client model rather
than that of an employer-employee, with the service providers generally being
unable to operate in an open market.[3] Between themselves, the kameen
traded to fulfill their needs on the basis of barter or some other system of
equal-value exchange.[5] The jajmani system enabled villages to be largely
self-sufficient economic entities that operated statically for subsistence rather
dynamically with the intention of growth and exchange of economic product
elsewhere